And then, on Friday 27th July at 9pm, the questions were answered and the negative comments rebutted. London 2012 opened to the world with great panache and splendour.

Danny Boyle and his troupe delivered an Opening Ceremony the nation can be proud of. Colour, movement, prose, pyrotechnics, and sound were threaded together in a collage of creative exuberance.

A captive global audience watched the drama of a nation’s life story played out before them. Literature, healthcare, industrialisation, and music – all British-led world-changing developments – were celebrated, and properly so.

Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth II (a constitutional monarch, which is a political and legal triumph itself to rival all others) – opened the proceedings and we were off and away.

There was much to be thankful to God for in the events of Friday night. I love my country and I am proud to be British. Of course, there is more to man than achievement and success, yet these things are worthy of celebration. Humankind is wonderful, diverse, and capable of amazing feats.

By celebrating the wonder of man we must never forget to go one step further and celebrate the Creator of man. An athlete may possess the pinnacle of human power, but it still is not powerful enough to fix mankind’s basic problem.

Consider these words from Psalm 33.

The king is not saved by a mighty army; A warrior is not delivered by great strength.
Behold, the eye of the LORD is on those who fear Him, On those who hope for His lovingkindness,

Consider Him who gave us the potential to produce what the world will now be watching together for the next two weeks. Let us remember that all “honour and power and might, be to our God forever and ever. Amen.”*

And now to the games. May they be a tremendous success. May the competitors give it their utmost and thrive in competition and the spirit of fair play.

And to Team GB – well done. We’re already proud of you. Take this opportunity, grasp it with the strength you have honed. Spend yourselves and leave nothing in the tank. God speed!

In a recent article about the imprisoned Ai Weiwei, Boris Johnson highlights China’s practice of silencing their critics and opponents seemingly at will and without fuss. In a Communist country that’s rapidly emerging into superpower status, formerly agreed upon world principles, like human rights, don’t seem to hold much weight. With an economy growing at at a faster rate than a sunflower on steroids in a hot June and an ever expanding military muscle to match, the world sits back and keeps silent on matters of principle.

This time, unlike the 80’s with Russia as the aggressor, we are facing a different situation. As Mr. Johnson correctly points out, by the mid-80’s Russia was in decline and people could see light at the end of the tunnel (although that was all very different just 10 year earlier). Today we see the strong and growing country of China that has such strategic economic might that we have to tread very differently around the situation. In the face of this different threat we have lost our nerve and kept quiet. Johnson states,

I just don’t believe that the Chinese respect us any more if we bite our tongues and say nothing about cases like Ai Weiwei. On the contrary, they must secretly think it pathetic that we claim to adhere to principles such as freedom from detention without trial — and then do nothing to back up our convictions.

If The Foundations Be Destroyed

“Conflict is the evil we most want to avoid, among nations, among individuals and within ourselves.”

So said Allan Bloom in his critique of the state of the foundations of the Western world in 1987, in his book, The Closing Of The American Mind (US|UK).

We are responsible to analyse the health of our nations and when we find it it be ill we must speak out. It is true indeed that only dead fish go with the flow. And in matters of morality it must be said that my nation, Great Britain, has cancer.

By swaying from principled absolutes into the realm of dialectic morality we have no back bone to stand up and cry “This is wrong”, even if we feel that we ought to speak out. What I mean is, the very foundations of our morality, our thinking what’s right and what’s wrong, has been changed. We live at a time when our hearts have inherited the fruit of a coherent and consistent framework of law built upon self-evident truths. Our hearts are one way inclined; our minds are otherwise instructed. We feel that something may be wrong but have no intellectual basis for claiming it to be so.

This shift in the core of the framework at the heart of the nations in the West didn’t happen overnight. Yes, towards the twilight days of Soviet Empire the West did speak out a little more but at the height of the Cold War deaf ears were turned on Alexander Solzhenitsyn and others. Indeed, those very same deaf ears were turned on Solzhenitsyn as he issued a warning to the West. After light had been shed on the atrocities of the Marxist regime and the world had hard proof, Solzhenitsyn went to America, and offered a plea for us to change our ways and rebuild our foundations. We did not listen.

“No weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Nothing is left, then, but concessions, attempts to gain time and betrayal.”

Solzhenitsyn continues with his diagnosis,

“How has this unfavorable relation of forces come about? How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present sickness? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing socially in accordance with its proclaimed intentions, with the help of brilliant technological progress. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.

This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists.”

The Pslamist cries out, “If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (Psalm 11:3) We long for a voice to speak out but standing on broken foundations doesn’t give us the platform we need to see change happen.

Where We Are Now

Be shifting our focal point for morality away from absolutes, by making man ‘the measure of all things’ and our canon for truth, we have moved away from the supports that created the foundations of the Western civilisations. Right and wrong fade away to be trumped by “whatever works”. The overarching, supreme principle we now live by is pragmatism. If it works, it works. If right and wrong are based on man and therefore forever changing we lose our ability to ask “what ought we do” and are left with “what can we do”.

Samual Adams, a Founding Father of the USA said,

“A general dissolution of principles and manners will surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous, they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue, they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.”

Willam Wilberforce, whose tireless efforts brought about the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, was wholly motivated by his zeal for a great “reformation of manners” – that is, bringing principled absolutes back into the core of society. He knew that only on the back of a morally strong nation could true and lasting reform take place to cure such abhorrent ills such as slavery.

In a world that’s changing so incredibly quickly now must be the time that we examine our foundations. This must start personally. What am I building my life on and why? What am I building towards?

To effect change requires a strong structure and a structure is only as strong as it’s foundations. So when we want to speak out against Ai Weiwei, or Burma, or Sudan, when we take a stand against sex trafficking, child labour or a host of other problems, do we want to merely speak with words?

Or do we want to stand on a strong structure rooted on unchanging truths that provide a platform to act and not merely shout at the problems we are faced with hoping that our hot air will blow them away.

Today she continues to polarise popular opinion and even if you were too young to remember much of her time in office (as I was) you more than likely still have some strong ideas about her.

For my part I see her as a courageous women who operated from convictions utterly alien to many politicians today. She put up a fight and won most of the time. She took our country by the reigns and proved that even a weak country with a strong leader can make a difference on the world stage. Britain, and the world, is the better for her. Her duty is an example to me, an inspiration, and a challenge.